Back, in Earnest

August 5, 2010

Life is much more sophisticated now. There used to be times in which people needed to kneel in order to show that they were no threat to the established order. Worse, in order to get anywhere you needed to make sure you fell in grace by a continued effort of bowing and kneeling and whatnot. Not that this was enough to get you definitely out of the whims of the powerful, no, in order to achieve that you needed to kneel and fall into grace and do whatnot and finally kill some of the fuckers in power to make place for your sorry old self.

No, life is much more sophisticated now we work on objective merit, as follows:

Our performance is assessed against objective criteria. The first one is that we commit to the corporate values, such as the über-corporate value of making sure that we actually deserve anything we get. Once we are beyond that we need to be just sure that whoever assesses our performance feels a warm and fuzzy feeling when assessing us. This can be done, but requires us to not shy away from the dirty work, to make sure we get noticed and noticed in a way that aligns with a certain preference of our assessors. No sweat, you just need to make sure you can ‘sell yourself’ well. Once achieved we are still mere employees; unless of course we decide to destabilize our assessors so that they fall from their position so making room for our final ascension into the heights of objective merit: the writers of corporate values and assessors of assessors.

No kneeling required anymore, just conformance to the idea of objective merit subjectively assessed and, specifically, the objective merit of, and in all of the, promotions.